In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of
Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of “highly
sensitive” emergency planning North had been involved in.
Ostensibly North had been handling plans for an emergency
response to a nuclear attack (a legitimate concern). But press
accounts alleged that the planning was for a more generalized
suspension of the constitution at the president’s
determination.

Oliver North at the Iran-Contra Hearings

As part of its routine Iran-contra coverage, the following
exchange was printed in the New York Times without
journalistic comment or follow-up:

[Congressman Jack] Brooks: Colonel North, in your work
at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on
plans for the continuity of government in the event of a
major disaster?

Both North’s attorney and Sen. Daniel Inouye, the
Democratic Chair of the Committee, responded in a way that
showed they were aware of the issue:

Brendan Sullivan [North's counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches
upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request
that you not touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman,
because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there
had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency
plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American
constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered
if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it
was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter
not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this,
I'm certain arrangements can be made for an
executive session.[1]

Brooks was responding to
a
story by Alfonzo Chardy in the Miami Herald about
Oliver North’s involvement with
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in planning for
“Continuity of Government” (COG). According to
Chardy, the plans envisaged “suspension of the
Constitution, turning control of the government over to the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of
military commanders to run state and local governments and
declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”[2]

Reagan had installed at FEMA a counterinsurgency team that he had
already assembled as governor of California. The team was headed
by Army Col. Louis Giuffrida, who had attracted Reagan’s
attention by a paper he had written while at the US Army War
College, advocating the forcible warrantless detention of
millions of black Americans in concentration camps. Reagan first
installed Giuffrida as head of the California National Guard, and
called on him “to design Operation Cable Splicer. . . .
martial law plans to legitimize the arrest and detention of
anti-Vietnam war activists and other political dissidents.”[3] These
plans were refined with the assistance of British
counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, who had used
massive detention and deportations to deal with the 1950s
Communist insurgency in what is now Malaysia.

At the time few people (including myself) attached much
importance to the Chardy story about COG. Chardy himself
suggested that Reagan’s Attorney General, William French
Smith, had intervened to stop the COG plan from being presented
to the President, and in 1985 Giuffrida was forced out of office
for having spent government money to build a private residence.
But COG planning not only continued, it expanded.

Seven years later, in 1994, Tim Weiner reported in the New
York Times that what he called
“The
Doomsday Project” – the search for “ways to keep the
Government running after a sustained nuclear attack on
Washington” – had “less than six months to live.”[4]

Weiner’s language was technically correct, but also very
misleading. In fact COG planning now simply continued with a new
target: terrorism. On the basis of Weiner’s article, the
first two books to discuss COG planning, by James Bamford and
James Mann, both reported that COG planning had been abandoned.[5] Recently Tim
Shorrock in 2008 repeated that “the COG program was
abandoned during the Clinton administration,” and Shirley
Anne Warshaw in 2009 wrote that “the Clinton
administration . . . shut down the super-secret Project.”[6] But on this
specific point, all these otherwise excellent and well-informed
authors were wrong.

What Weiner and these authors did not report was that in the
final months of Reagan’s presidency the purpose of COG
planning had officially changed: it was no longer for
arrangements “after a nuclear war,” but for
any "national security emergency." This was defined in
Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “any occurrence,
including natural disaster, military attack, technological
emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or
seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”[7] In this way
a totally legitimate program dating back to Eisenhower, of
planning extraordinary emergency measures for an America
devastated in a nuclear attack, was now converted to confer
equivalent secret powers on the White House, for anything it
considered an emergency.

This expanded application of COG was apparently envisaged as
early as 1984, when, according to Boston Globe reporter
Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency . . . to draw up a secret contingency
plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the
detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens in case
of an unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was
codenamed Rex 84, called for the suspension of the Constitution
under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.[8]

In other words, extreme measures, designed originally to deal
with an externally directed and devastating nuclear attack, were
being secretly modified to deal with domestic dissenters: a
situation that still pertains today.[9]

The Implementation of COG on 9/11

Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the implementation of COG
measures, and we know for certain that COG plans were implemented
on that day in 2001, before the last plane had crashed in
Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on
pages 38 and 326.[10] It
was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington
on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz
were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain
near Camp David.[11]

But the implementation of COG went beyond short-term responses,
to the installation of what Professor Shirley Anne Warshaw calls
a ninety-day alternative “shadow government” outside
Washington.

Cheney jumped into action in his bunker beneath the east Wing to
ensure continuity in government. He immediately began to create
his shadow government by ordering one hundred mid-level executive
officials to move to specially designated underground bunkers and
stay there twenty-four hours a day. They would not be rotated
out, he informed them, for ninety days, since there was evidence,
he hinted, that the terrorist organization al-Qa’ida, which
had masterminded the attack, had nuclear weapons. The shadow
government, as a result, needed to be ready to take over the
government from the bunkers.[12]

These ninety days saw the swift implementation of the key
features attributed to COG planning by Gelbspan and Chardy in the
1980s: warrantless detentions, warrantless
deportations, and the warrantless eavesdropping that
is their logical counterpart. The clearest example was the
administration’s
Project
Endgame—a ten-year plan,
initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost
of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone.[13] This implemented the central feature of the
massive detention exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis Giuffrida
and Oliver North in 1984.[14]

There was also a flurry of other rapid moves to restructure
America’s external and domestic structures. Before
discussing these, I should acknowledge the obvious: that enhanced
measures to deal with terrorism are needed, and for some of them
we should be grateful. We should acknowledge also, however, that
the most significant achievements against terrorism have been the
result of traditional intelligence and police work. As for the
War on Terror, the most prominent achievement of Cheney’s
ninety days, as many experts have asserted, it
has
created far more terrorists than it has disposed of.

On September 20, 2001, Bush launched the war on terror in a
televised address to a joint session of congress, when he said,
“Our ‘war on terror’ begins with al Qaeda, but
it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist
group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Today we now have about 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan to deal
with an officially estimated 60 members of Al Qaeda. The
predictable result has been an expansion of terrorist
activities in Somalia, Yemen, and above all Pakistan.

Bush launches the ‘War on Terror’ as Rumsfeld looks on

The war on terror was administratively implemented in three
National Security Presidential Directives, NSPDs 7, 8, and 9. All
three are classified, and the topics of two of them are unknown.
The third, NSPD 9 of October 25, 2001, directed the Secretary of
Defense to plan military options against both Taliban and al
Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.[15]

The October date is misleading. A version of the directive
calling for covert action in Afghanistan had been approved by
principals on September 4, 2001, one week before9/11.[16] An enhanced plan
for military action in Afghanistan, had been approved by Bush on
September 17; and the same document “directed the Pentagon
to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.”[17]

Perhaps the most significant domestic product from Cheney’s
trimester mirabilis was
the
Patriot Act of October 25, 2001. Congress
was given only one week to pass this 340-page
bill, which in the opinion of researchers “was already
written and ready to go long before September 11th.”[18] In 2007 the
Justice Department acknowledged that FBI agents had abused the
Patriot Act more than 1000 times.

We should not forget that the
Patriot
Act was only passed after
lethal weapons-grade anthrax letters were mailed to two crucial
Democratic Senators – Senators Daschle and Leahy
– who had initially questioned the bill. After the anthrax
letters, however, they withdrew their initial opposition.[19] Someone
– we still do not know who – must have planned those
anthrax letters well in advance. We should not forget either that
some government experts initially blamed the attacks on Iraq.
Much later, referring to Fort Detrick, Salon reporter Glenn
Greenwald pointed out that “the same Government lab where
the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where
the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.”[20]

It is generally agreed that, of the three men in National Command
Authority on 9/11, Cheney was the ideologue most committed to
restoring the power of a presidency that had been weakened by Watergate.[21] Cheney had
already declared in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his
belief that “the Chief Executive will on occasion feel
duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative
that will permit him to exceed the law.”[22] And as
Vice-President Cheney, along with Cheney’s assistant David
Addington and Cheney’s appointee John Yoo, established the
legal apparatus for declaring that the President had the
prerogative power to “deploy military forces
preemptively,” and that “the Geneva Conventions and
other international agreements against torture ‘do not
protect members of the al Qaeda organization.”[23]

By Executive
Order 13228 of October 8, 2001, the President
established an Office of Homeland Security within the
presidential Executive Office. This has engendered in turn the
DHS, now the third largest US Cabinet Department, and also a
series of Homeland Security Presidential Directives. For example
Homeland
Security Presidential Directive-6 (HSPD-6) of September
16, 2003, created a Terrorism Screening Center (TSC), to
“consolidate the Government’s approach to terrorism
screening.”[24]

Since then we have become inured to repeated stories about
nonviolent individuals who are prevented from boarding airplanes,
because their names are in TSC computers on the No Fly List and
the Terrorist Watch List. Senator Ted Kennedy testified in
Congress that he had been repeatedly delayed at airports because
a “T Kennedy” was on the No Fly List. Until July
2008, Nelson Mandela was also on the list.

In addition to the No Fly List, with 4000 names in 2009 and 8000
today, some people are prevented from flying because they are on the
Terrorist
Watch List, a much longer list which contained over
one million names as of summer 2010. This is why Walter F.
Murphy, a noted professor of constitutional law, was detained in
2007 on his journey to lecture, ironically, about his book
Constitutional Democracy. According to Professor Murphy,
he was asked by an airline employee,

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from
flying because of that" . . . ”I explained," said
Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006,
given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web,
highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.[25]

In the end these cases were resolved satisfactorily. But you risk
permanent deportation if you have an Arabic-sounding name. The
ACLU is suing on behalf of Ayman Latif, not just a U.S. citizen
but a disabled U.S. Marine veteran, who under Obama has been
stranded in Egypt for months, because, on orders from the U.S.
Embassy, he has not been able to board a plane to come home.

This is a real hardship case: Latif told NPR that “because
I missed my appointments in the U.S. to be evaluated [as a
disabled vet], now the VA administration is saying that they're
going to cut my benefits from what they are now to zero.”
On the same program Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary
for policy with the Department of Homeland Security, vigorously
defended the No Fly List. But when asked if there is “any
legal authority by which the United States can say to a
citizen who is abroad, you may not return to this country?”
Baker replied, “I know of none.”[26] This did
not seem to concern him.

Ayman Latif’s case is far from unique. According to the
New York Times,

Advocacy groups say they are trying to help Americans stranded in
Yemen, Egypt, Colombia and Croatia, among other countries. At
least one American, Raymond Earl Knaeble IV, who studied in Yemen
and is now in Colombia, was returned to Colombia by the Mexican
authorities after he sought to cross the border into the United
States, the groups say.[27]

The Militarization of American Law Enforcement

Another post-9/11 innovation from the Giuffrida-Oliver North COG
plans was the militarization of domestic United States law
enforcement in 2002, under a new military command, NORTHCOM.[28] Through
NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with local enforcement in
the surveillance and counter-terrorism planning of America, in
the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local
enforcement to police Iraq. Of course army platoons do not patrol
roads and break down the doors of Kansas homes, as they routinely
do in Iraq or Afghanistan. But behind the scenes, in so-called
fusion centers, the military, the FBI, state police, along with
private intelligence corporations like SAIC, maintain and analyze
data to identify potential threats to those in power.[29]

These fusion centers “have been internally promoted by the
US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military
from spying on the domestic population.”[30] In
other words, administrative arrangements have been used to
fulfill Giuffrida’s plans of circumventing the
Posse
Comitatus Acts on the statute books, without repealing them.

The Proclamation of Permanent Emergencies

Finally, still in the 90-day “shadow government”
period after 9/11, President Bush proclaimed two important
emergencies that are still in force today.

On September 14, 2001, Bush issued
Proclamation 7463
(“Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain
Terrorist Attacks”) together with
Executive
Order 13223
(“Ordering the Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces To Active
Duty”). As we shall see, the terms of this proclamation
were significantly expanded when it was renewed in 2007.

“On September 23, 2001, by
Executive
Order 13224, the
President declared a national emergency with respect to persons
who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism, pursuant to
the International Emergency Economic Powers Act
(50 U.S.C. 1701-1706).”[31] This
gave the president the power to confiscate without trial or
warning the property of individuals providing funds to entities,
such as charitable foundations, which were judged to be
supporting terrorism. The Executive Order initially blocked
property of twenty-seven designated terrorists. But the list has
become enormous. When I last looked at it, on November 18, 2010,
the list included 87 pages just for the letter A.

[December 28, 2011 - the list now has 92 pages for the letter A.
PDF file is 519 pages, 505 of which are for individuals, the
remaining are "Blocked Vessels". Entry point to list:
Specially
Designated Nationals List (SDN)]

A lawsuit has been instituted, asserting that the designation of
alleged terrorists was arbitrary; and a lower court agreed that
the president's designation authority is unconstitutionally vague.[32] The case is under
appeal.

Cheney and Rumsfeld on the Secret Committee to Plan COG

From its beginning in 1982, two of the key planners on the secret
COG planning committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the
same two men who implemented COG on 9/11.[33] The committee had been established by Reagan
under a secret executive order, NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982.
Despite what Weiner implied, the committee continued to meet
without interruption until the George W. Bush presidency in 2001.[34]

Thus Cheney and Rumsfeld continued their secret planning during
the Clinton presidency; even after both men, both Republicans,
were by that time heads of major corporations and not in the
government. Andrew Cockburn cites a Pentagon source to support a
claim that the Clinton administration had “no idea what was
going on.”

Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200
million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now
replaced by terrorists. . . . There were other changes, too. In
earlier times the specialists selected to run the “shadow
government” had been drawn from across the political
spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the
bunkers, Rumsfeld found himself in politically congenial company,
the players’ roster being filled almost exclusively with
Republican hawks. . . .“You could say this was a secret
government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was
extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on.”[35]

Cockburn’s account requires some qualification. Richard
Clarke, a Clinton Democrat, makes it clear that he participated
in the COG games in the 1990s and indeed drafted Clinton’s
Presidential
Decision Directive (PDD) 67 on “Enduring
Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government.”[36] But
COG planning involved different teams for different purposes. It
is quite possible that the Pentagon official was describing the
Department of Defense team dealing with retaliation.

It is important to understand that the COG “Doomsday
Project” in the 1980s involved more than planning and
exercises. It also oversaw
“Project
908,” the construction of a multibillion dollar infrastructure
for an alternative government. The key element of this was an $8 billion
communications and logistics program headquartered at Fort
Huachuca, Arizona, the headquarters for Army Intelligence.[37]

Despite initial failures in the communications network, it was
ready to be put into operation and utilized on September 11, 2001
by Vice-President Cheney.[38] Key commands, including the implementation
of COG itself, appear to have been made over this
highest-classification security network.[39] This may explain why a Boeing E-4B Advanced
Airborne Command Post or “Doomsday Plane,” the mobile
communications center for the COG shadow government, was seen
around 10 AM in the prohibited air space above the White House.[40]

There is no way to determine how many of the constitutional
changes since 9/11 can be traced to COG planning. However we do
know that new COG planning measures were still being
introduced in 2007, when President Bush issued
National
Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51/HSPD-20). This Directive set
out what FEMA later called “a new vision to ensure the
continuity of our Government,” and was followed in August
by a new National Continuity Policy Implementation Plan.[41]

Under pressure from his 911truth constituents, Congressman Peter
DeFazio of the Homeland Security Committee twice requested to see
these Annexes. When his request was denied, DeFazio made a second
request, in a letter signed by the Chair of his committee. The
request was denied again.[42]

COG, The National Emergency, and the National Emergencies
Act

I mentioned earlier that the Proclamation of a national emergency,
issued
by Bush on September 14, 2001, and since
renewed annually to this day, changed significantly in 2007. All
previous annual renewals had enumerated the emergency measures
that were being renewed, for example “the measures taken on
September 14, 2001, November 16, 2001, and January 16,
2002.” After Bush issued NSPD-51 of 2007, with its
“new vision” and its new classified COG Annexes, the
next renewal of the Emergency proclamation replaced the previous
specific enumerations with a more sweeping general sentence:

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency
declared on September 14, 2001, last extended on September 5,
2006, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that
emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2007.[43]

“The powers and authorities adopted to deal with that
emergency.” This language is so vague, it is hard to see
how it could not cover the “classified continuity
annexes” of NSPD-51 as well. If so, the public proclamation
was now proclaiming the continuation of secret powers. (The
two renewals of the Emergency by Barack Obama do not repeat this
language from 2007, but likewise fail to enumerate just what
powers are being extended.)[44]

The National
Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms
that Vice-President Cheney so abhorred, specifies that:
“Not later than six months after a national emergency is
declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period
thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress
shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine
whether that emergency shall be terminated” (50 U.S.C.
1622, 2002).[45] The law
does not permit Congress to review an emergency; it
requires Congress to review it.

Yet in nine years Congress has not once met to discuss the State
of Emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11, a
State of Emergency that remains in effect today. Appeals to the
Congress to meet its responsibilities to review COG have fallen
on deaf ears, even during periods when the Congress has been
dominated by Democrats.[46]

Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly in 2009,
both to President Obama to terminate the emergency, and to
Congress to hold the hearings required of them by statute.[47] But Obama,
without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on
September 10, 2009,[48]
and again a year later.[49] Meanwhile Congress has continued to ignore
its statutory obligations.

One Congressman explained to a constituent that the provisions of
the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative
by COG. If true, this would indicate that the constitutional
system of checks and balances no longer applies, and also that
secret decrees now override public legislation as the law of the
land.

With a few notable exceptions, there has thus far been scant
interest in the media and the public in the extraordinary facts
that Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to

help plan successfully for constitutional
modifications, when not in government, and

implement these same changes themselves
when back in power.

The first of these facts gives us a glimpse of an on-going power
realm independent of the publicly acknowledged state. In the
words of James Mann, “Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense,
a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security
apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which
Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.”[50] A CNN
Special Assignment assessment of the COG planners was even more
dramatic: “In the United States of America there is a
hidden government about which you know nothing.”[51]

What is the first step out of this current state of affairs, in
which the constitution appears to have been superseded by a
higher, if less legitimate authority? I submit that it is to get
Congress to do what the law requires, and determine whether our
present proclamation of emergency “shall be terminated”
(50 U.S.C.
1622, 2002).

As part of this procedure, Congress should find whether secret
COG powers, never submitted to Congress or seen by it, are among
“the powers and authorities” which Bush in 2007
included in his prolongation of the 2001 emergency and which are
maintained today under Obama.

This is not a technical or procedural detail. It is a test of
whether the United States is presently governed by its laws and
constitution, or whether, as has been alleged, the laws and
constitution have now in places been superseded by COG.

Congress should go further to look into the activities of
Cheney’s ninety days of COG shadow government in 2001, and
their relationship to the genesis of the
Patriot
Act, the ten-year program for detention camps, and the
permanent militarization of US domestic law enforcement.

This is a slightly revised, expanded, and developed text of an
address to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, November 23,
2010.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of
Emergency Superseding the US Constitution? Continuity of
Government Planning, War and American Society," The Asia-Pacific
Journal, 48-1-10, November 29, 2010.

New York Times, July 14, 1987. We have never heard if
there was or was not an executive session, or if the rest of
Congress was ever aware of the matter. According to James
Bamford, “The existence of the secret government was so
closely held that Congress was completely bypassed. Rather than
through legislation, it was created by Top Secret presidential
fiat. In fact, Congress would have no role in the new wartime
administration. ‘One of the awkward questions we
faced,’ said one of the participants, ‘was whether to
reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that
no, it would be easier to operate without them.’”
(James
Bamford,
A
Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse
of America’s Intelligence Agencies [New York:
Doubleday, 2004], 74); cf.
James
Mann,
The
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet [New
York: Viking, 2004], 145). But key individuals in Congress, such
as Sen. Inouye of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were
certainly aware of something.

Diana
Reynolds, The Rise of the National Security State: FEMA and
the NSC, Political Research Associates, Covert Action
Information Bulletin, #33 (Winter 1990). “Earlier,
Governor Reagan in California had authorized the development of a
counterinsurgency plan (known as Cable Splicer) and exercises to
deal with such crises, in conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army
and the Pentagon (Operation Garden Plot). The cadres developing
Cable Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida), were with
Reagan’s elevation to the presidency transferred into FEMA.
As head of FEMA, Giuffrida pursued plans for massive detention of
dissidents; these became so extreme that even Reagan’s
attorney general, William French Smith, raised objections”
(Scott, The Road to 9/11, 184; citing Gelbspan,
Break-ins,
184).
[From The Road to 9/11, significant footnote references
from page 184 include:

“The
Armageddon Plan,” During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside
the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new
‘President’ in the event that a nuclear attack killed
the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of
the Bush Administration on and after 9/11, By James Mann,
The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004.

The provisions of Executive Order 12656 of Nov.
18, 1988, appear at 53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 585, link.
The Washington Post (March 1, 2002) later claimed,
falsely, that Executive Order 12656 dealt only with “a
nuclear attack.” Earlier there was a similar
misrepresentation in the New York Times (November 18,
1991).

Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins,
Death Threats, and the FBI (Boston: South End Press, 1991),
184; cf. New York
Times, November 18, 1991. REX 84 (short for Readiness
Exercise 84) turned out to be part of a series of such exercises
(now known as Continuity of Operations Exercises) that have
continued under FEMA down into the Obama era. See for example the
Department of Homeland Press Release, “DHS Conducts
Continuity of Operations Exercise,” June 17, 2009, link.

In stressing the alteration of our present
political milieu by an extra-governmental group, I do not intend
to exonerate Congress. In 1981 Congress passed the
Military
Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act. According
to a brilliant and prescient essay written by an Air Force
Colonel at the National War College, the Act “was
specifically intended to force reluctant military commanders to
actively collaborate in police work” (Air Force Lt. Col.
Charles E. Dunlap,
“The
Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012;”
quoted in Harry G. Summers, The new world strategy: a
military policy for America's future (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995), 195.

Warshaw, The co-presidency of Bush and
Cheney, 164-65; cf. Washington Post, March 1, 2002; Scott,
Road to 9/11, 237. Warshaw took the characterization of
“shadow government” from earlier reports by U.S.
News and World Report in 1989, and CNN in 1991 (Warshaw,
162).

“The exercise anticipated civil
disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect
continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight
subversive activities, there was authorization for the military
to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations
at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified
segments of the population, and the imposition of martial
rule” (Diana
Reynolds, “The Rise of the National Security State:
FEMA and the NSC,” Political Research Associates, Covert
Action Information Bulletin, #33 (Winter 1990).

“NSPD-9:
Combating Terrorism,” Federation of American
Scientists: “On April 1, 2004, the White House released the
following characterization of this otherwise classified document:
“The NSPD called on the Secretary of Defense to plan for
military options ‘against Taliban targets in Afghanistan,
including leadership, command-control, air and air defense,
ground forces, and logistics.’ The NSPD also called for
plans ‘against al Qaeda and associated terrorist facilities
in Afghanistan, including leadership,
command-control-communications, training, and logistics
facilities.’”

Cf. Time, Nov. 26, 2001: "While
Daschle, the Senate majority leader, could have been chosen as a
representative of all Democrats or of the entire Senate, Leahy is
a less obvious choice, most likely targeted for a specific
reason. He is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is
involved in issues ranging from antitrust action to antiterror
legislation” [emphasis added]. See also Anthony
York, “Why Daschle and Leahy?” Salon, November
21, 2001.

“Former U.S. Marine Placed On ‘No
Fly’ List, Sues FBI,” NPR, August 5, 2010, link.
Even my two-year old grandson and his family were taken aside for
special questioning at the airport, because of his middle name,
Yusuf.

U.S. Department of Defense, “U.S. Northern Command,” link.
Cf. John R. Brinkerhoff, PBS, Online Newshour, 9/27/02:
“The United States itself is now for the first time since
the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should
apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the
United States that we apply in other theaters of war.”
Brinkerhoff had earlier developed the martial law provisions of
REX 84 in the Reagan era. [See Also:
Foundations
are in place for martial law in the US, by Ritt Goldstein,
Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 2002, and
Internment
Camps and Authoritarian US Fast Becoming Reality, by Ritt Goldstein,
2002]

Julian
Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,”
Wikileaks. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of
Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains
phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are
emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US,
because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police
discipline and standards."

“Notice-Continuation of the National
Emergency With Respect to Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit,
or Support Terrorism,” Daily Compilation Of Presidential
Documents” (“Author: Obama, Barack H”),
September 16, 2010, link.

Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire,
and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2007), 183-87.
[In Chapter 11, Parallel Structure
and Plans for Continuity of Government, these pages form the section
titled: "Cheney, Rumsfeld, and COG Planning in the 1980s". Significant
footnote references from this section of pages includes:

“The
Armageddon Plan,” During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside
the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new
‘President’ in the event that a nuclear attack killed
the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of
the Bush Administration on and after 9/11, By James Mann,
The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004.

Shorrock, Spies for hire, 72-75,
292-96. Warshaw and others have referred to the whole COG
operation as “Project 908;” but on the basis of
available evidence I believe that Project 908 was the
construction program only, as opposed to the planning and
exercises which also took place. Project 908 attracted the
attention of Steve Emerson and other journalists in 1989, when it
was revealed that there had been huge cost overruns, double
billing for the same work, and eventually destruction of many key
contract documents in the course of an Army investigation. The
son of the Army general overseeing the project, former
Congressman Rick Renzi, was eventually indicted in 2008 on
related charges of extortion, fraud, money laundering and other
crimes. Steven Emerson, “America’s Doomsday
Project,” U.S. News & World Report, August 7,
1989, 26-31. As of this writing, Rick Renzi’s trial, which
was scheduled to begin in March 2010, “has been postponed
indefinitely” (Arizona Republic, March 16, 2010)

See discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11,
223-36. There were reports that when Bush was airborne in Air
force One on 9/11, there were connectivity problems forcing the
president to use an ordinary cell phone (Paul Thompson, The
Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute
[NewYork: HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004], 437). This may help
explain why Air Force One eventually flew to Offutt Air Force
Base near Omaha, where the E4-B “Doomsday Planes” are
based.

CNN, September 11, 2007, video. On
the CNN show 9/11 Commission Co-chair Lee Hamilton said he had a
vague memory of the mystery plane story, but that it was never
discussed by the 9/11 Commission. CNN promptly withdrew its 9/11
E-4B story from its website (“CNN Pulls 9/11 E4B 'Doomsday'
Plane Video Over White House,” digg, September 13, 2007)

“Notice from the President on the
Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain
Terrorist Attacks: . . . Consistent with section 202(d) of the
National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for
1 year the national emergency previously declared on September
14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate
threat of further attacks on the United States. Because the
terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on
September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to
deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September
14, 2010. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional
year the national emergency that was declared on September 14,
2001, with respect to the terrorist threat. This notice
shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the
Congress. BARACK OBAMA, THE WHITE HOUSE, September 10,
2010,” link
[December 28, 2011: The third renewal of the above - with identical wording
- was declared and signed on September 9, 2011 with link updated.
See Also: National Emergency Powers Report]

This language overruled the specification in
President Ford’s
Executive
Order 11921 the same year, that, when a state of emergency
was declared by the President, Congress could not review the
matter for a period of six months.